Archive of posts with the tag Graal

Since SOMns is a pure research project, we aren’t usually doing releases for SOMns yet. However, we added many different concurrency abstractions since December and have plans for bigger changes. So, it seems like a good time to wrap up another step, and get it into a somewhat stable shape.

Step 2: Adding Bit Operations To Golo

Over the course of the next four weeks, I plan to publish a new post every Tuesday to give a detailed introduction on how to use the Graal compiler and the Truffle framework to build fast languages. And this is the very first post to setup this series. The next posts are going to provide a bit of background on Golo, the language we are experimenting with, then build up the basic interpreter for executing a simple Fibonacci and later a Mandelbrot computation. To round off the series, we will also discuss how to use one of the tools that come with Graal to optimize the performance of an interpreter. But for today, let’s start with the basics.

The first results of my experiments with self-optimizing interpreters was finally published in IEEE Software. It is a brief and very high-level comparison of the Truffle approach with a classic bytecode-based interpreter on top of RPython. If you aren’t familiar with either of these approaches, the article is hopefully a good starting point. The experiments described in it use SOM, a simple Smalltalk.